University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries Magazine | Page 18
Wisconsin Emergency
Management Images and
Historic Materials
WEM0221
Somerset tire fire, 1986
18 | LIBRARIES Fall 2015
agency partnerships. The Wisconsin Public
Land Survey Records contains plat maps and
the accompanying notebooks that resulted
from the survey of Wisconsin conducted
between 1832 and 1866 by the federal General
Land Office. The digital collection was
launched in 2003 and resurvey maps were
added in 2010. It is an incredibly important
geographic and historic resource, since this
work established the essential patterns upon
which land ownership and land use is based.
According to Jaime Martindale, Map and
Geospatial Data Librarian at the Arthur H.
Robinson Map Library, “The survey notes
and original plats offer the oldest ‘baseline’
dataset for researchers to begin their historic
work, by showing the very first cartographic
depiction of the public land survey system
(Township, Range, Sections), accompanied
by detailed descriptions of the vegetation,
terrain, and hydrographic features in the
field notes. In many cases, the early plats and
survey notes in the BCPL collection provide
the earliest pieces of information describing
tracts of land across Wisconsin, which can
be very personal and meaningful for people
in academic research, professional, or family
history settings.”
The first 500 images will be joined by
nearly 2,000 more photographs, with an
antici ]Y